Marketing

Time to Make Money!

Identify the best client prospects. This may hurt your feelings, but not everyone will care about your mission. And not everyone will give. Look at both demographics and psychographics, and create a profile.

Tell your story. Telling your story is key to fundraising, but what is your story? And it must be told in a way that’s easily understandable and meaningful to your ideal donor prospect. That means you must use simple language, leave out the jargon, and keep it short. When you tell a compelling story, people will take action. They’ll make a gift or sign up to volunteer, and isn’t that what you really want?

Make a list of questions you know your customers (or even your customer’s customers) have.

Plan how and when you will market your product. Plan how, when, who, and what for every fundraising activity you undertake. And document it in a written plan to guide your activities so you know where you’re headed. After all, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.

Try out various strategies and compare the results at each stage. In the end, the campaign that performs the best at all three levels is ultimately the one that you should continue pursuing.

Goal for awareness: The goal for spreading awareness is earning a higher number of impressions and views. The more impressions you are getting, the more people are seeing your name and becoming familiar with your brand. If you are running multiple tests with different text ads, whichever has the highest impression score will be your best bet moving forward.

How to drive awareness: There are several ways how you can increase awareness of your brand in the digital space:

How to measure awareness: in all fairness – awareness is one of the hardest things to track. However, online advertising platforms allow to track impressions and views. The more impressions you have received – the more people you have reached.

Eventually, these impressions will turn into clicks, downloads, or clicks. This will indicate that people are now are approving of your brand and are in the acceptance stage.

Goal for acceptance: While the goal for awareness was increased impressions and views, the goal of acceptance is to drive engagement and grow your click-through-rate (CTR). With basic analytics tools, you can see how many people saw your listing (or social media post, email, etc.) vs. how many people actually clicked on it.

The bad news is that your click-through-rate is always going to be low when it comes to remarketing; however, the good news is that this is totally normal, and you shouldn’t worry about it. In fact, 1% is actually a very healthy CTR. The people who have moved from awareness to acceptance are the ones who are engaging, clicking and driving legitimate traffic to your site, and that’s who you should focus on moving to the next step.

How to drive acceptance: One way to accomplish this is through engagement. When you can get your audience to move from awareness to acceptance, you’ve managed to win their trust on a basic level. You’ll see this when customers start connecting with you in various ways, including:

How to measure acceptance: Depending on the method you are measuring, there should be settings within the program or social media platform to track the number of shares, clicks and views that particular page or post had. Documenting these results in a file and comparing results week after week will show you if your acceptance rate is increasing, decreasing or staying stagnant. Then, adjust accordingly.

And don’t forget to share all your shiny new content on social media. You’ll want to broadcast to the world all the great info you’re going to start pumping out.